It is stupid easy to get a free .edu account. It will not hamper spammers in the slightest. Even if they don’t want to make a few .edu accounts a day to do their spamming, they can just buy .edu accounts in bulk for about 10 cents per. No one is making thousands of kbin accounts to spam from, they make a handful a day, and use them till they get banned. Then they make a few more.
.edu accounts are a terrible way to try and prevent spam on kbin. There is literally an industry around generating fake .edu accounts. You can buy them in bulk. Some colleges receive 10’s of thousands of fake applications a month trying to get free .edu emails.
I think you're thinking 4 year college, not 2 years. It takes a lot of effort and money to apply to a 4 year school. It takes like 5 minutes to apply at your local community college online and get a .edu email address, and it's free.
Using .edu as some sort of validation is a terrible idea because it's something anyone can get with just a few minutes of work.
Hopefully being a community thing and not a corporate thing will help. I think people will be less likely to steal, and more likely to rat someone out for stealing.
Any time I tried to get someone to check out Reddit, I hated having to preface it with, oh and you're going to want to block these 30 subs, they're horrible, and here's another 100 that are kinda gross, I'll email you my list......
There's stuff to block, but there's stuff that should be banned too. I remember recommending some of the SQL reddits to coworkers just weeks before the jailbait crap hit the national news. It's up to ernest how he wants to run this place, but I hope we don't let the bar go too low.